


Only Understood Backwards

by Maidenjedi



Category: Jurassic Park - All Media Types, Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 18:33:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19469740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: Owen Grady reaches out to Alan Grant, and a connection is made.





	Only Understood Backwards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [philote_auctor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/philote_auctor/gifts).



He watched with dawning horror as the news anchor, more than a bit startled at what she was reading off the teleprompter, described the “accident” at Simon Masrani’s hubris project in South America.

And he jumped when his cell phone rang, the screen reading “Lex.” 

Heart in his throat, he turned down the volume on the television and picked up the phone.

“I know, I’m watching it now,” he said, before Lex could scream the expletives he knew would come pouring out of her mouth.

“How? I mean, we told him, we said…”

“We did. And they didn’t listen.”

“Spokespeople for the Masrani Corporation were unavailable for comment, but we were able to speak briefly with Ian Malcolm, noted scientist and survivor of the previous incident on Isla Nublar, and he said…”

Alan turned it off.

“Lex? You still there?”

“He’s a piece of shit, Alan. Why would they not call you? You survived it twice. You _know_ about these things.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. Lex, all these years later, didn’t always admit she’d seen them, too. Her coping mechanism was denial. They’d all had their ways.

Alan changed the subject. “Have you talked to Tim?”

“He texted. He’s okay. Appalled.”

No one with sense, and certainly no one who had once been chased by a velociraptor through an industrial kitchen, could be less than appalled just then.

“Alan, what about Ellie? Does she know?”

If Ellie Sattler was any place she could hear about what had happened at Isla Nublar, Alan Grant was likely the last person she would call, in his considered opinion. But he grunted a non-committal response to Lex and kept it at that. The kids – ha, _kids_ – didn’t know everything about Alan and Ellie, or even about Ian, and what their “coping mechanisms” had been.

“Shit, Tim’s calling. I’ll call you back, Alan.”

“Okay.”

“It’ll be okay. Don’t…don’t do anything.”

He barked a laugh. “There’s nothing we can do, Lex.”

She hung up.

The phone rang once more, and Alan almost thought it might be Ellie again, when he saw the number was one he had half hoped he wouldn’t see on his caller i.d. at all.

-

The day Owen Grady had taken the job with Simon Masrani, he’d not quite believed that anyone, InGen or Hammond or anyone, had actually brought back the dinosaurs. A part of him believed it all urban myth, and with good reason, as hardly any credible source had reported on Isla Nublar, Jurassic Park, any of it. He’d been a kid when it all went down and then he’d been in the Navy, and if there was an incident, well, that was above his pay grade.

Then he’d seen the eggs, and been there for Blue’s birth, and he was a true believer from that day forward.

Blue was alive, out there now, back on the island. There was talk that the island may be nuked – and he was assured by others, that talk had been prevalent before, but secrecy had trumped security. Leave them alone and they’ll leave us alone, and InGen had buried the data and life moved on.

Owen watched Claire brush her hair, put on eyeliner. Life was moving on, in a way. But her hand shook and she said “shit” under her breath when the make-up trailed to the side. Owen knew he wasn’t much better – he hadn’t slept more than an hour a night since they’d been released from quarantine. 

Quarantine. A hard debrief was what it had been. The stack of non-disclosure forms alone had worn him out.

Claire had another day to face at court, another set of lawsuits. The only corporate face left, Masrani himself gone and too many others dead or disappeared. Hell, the InGen people had managed to finagle a way out of responsibility, their scientists seemingly gone from the face of the planet, and frankly, given everything, a part of Owen wasn’t totally convinced that wasn’t the truth. They’d wiped the facility, no trace of the plans made for the Indominus, no embryos or anything at all. A cover-up, Claire had said with a wry frown. She stood before the mirror holding it together with a prayer and impeccable looks. Owen didn’t envy her the court appearance, but the confidence she applied every morning seemed handy.

“Shit,” she said again, looking at the time, frantically reapplying her eyeliner.

Owen walked over and kissed the top of her head. “Steady, Claire, steady. You got this.”

“I got this. Sure. Standing up for a dead man’s dreams, nodding and taking every accusation as if I were personally responsible. Sure.”

Owen didn’t reply, but rubbed his hand over her shoulder blades, the silk of her blouse catching ever so slightly on the calluses of his hand. She’d said it a thousand times, and he couldn’t make this one better. 

“Are you coming to the court today?”

He did, some days. Sometimes when she asked, sometimes when the only word she’d said before leaving in the morning was “shit.”

“Not today. I’m meeting a friend.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Maybe. Alan Grant.”

Claire raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

“Really. He agreed to meet.”

“You think it will help at all? Meeting him?”

“I think it might. He knows, after all. He was there, once.”

Claire nodded. 

“He was.”

She turned around and risked smearing her makeup all over again to hug Owen close, and kiss his face.

“Have a good day, then.”

-

After the park, Alan Grant had very nearly given up paleontology altogether.

He’d gone from being the premiere scientist in the field (it was true, though he’d hardly recognized his own accomplishments, always pushing for the next discovery) to one ostracized. He’d not been able to keep his observations at the park to himself; after the trauma subsided, he’d burst out with new theories. No, not theories, facts. He knew things now, about the raptors, yes, but also the t-rex, the apatosaur, the trikes, all of them.

Insisting that they were facts, of course, was what led to his shunning in the field. Oh, sure, he still published. His book on the velociraptors had done modestly on the big non-fiction lists. But the accolades, the pats on the back, the consensus he wanted in his inmost being? _Nada_.

Ellie used to try and soften that blow, confirming every theory and adding her own. But she hadn’t tried to publish, she’d never told another soul, and really, hadn’t that been the end of everything?

He sipped a coffee. He’d gotten a cock-eyed, disbelieving look when he insisted on plain, unadulterated black coffee. The future, ladies and gentlemen.

Owen Grady sat across from him, refreshingly unscarred from his recent encounters on the island. His coffee, too, was black, but he’d escaped the narrowed-eye skepticism. Alan remembered Owen’s disarming ways from their first meeting. It had put him in mind of Ian Malcolm and he’d been wary of this kid – hell, he was Lex’s age, maybe – but Owen had proven he was more than a cocky grin and cargo shorts through that conversation. It was just that Alan hadn’t been able to stop him going, hadn’t been able to convey the terror, the real horror of what had been created the first time and what, no doubt, was waiting for Owen on the island.

A damned fool, and that was fact.

Owen eyed Alan Grant now with the same slight awe and disbelief that he had the first time. Alan was older now, of course, and had probably shrunk some, had turned in on himself to a degree. The photos Owen had seen conveyed a man he thought he could have a beer with, someone who understood the elements and animals, someone for whom nature was no toy. And in his eyes, there was some of that left. But he was a buttoned-up scholar to Owen’s way of thinking, now, though none in the field would have agreed. 

Sitting at the table now, Alan’s look was haughty, I-told-you-so. It was also weary, and his turn of phrase as he began recounting his memory of the _Tyrannosaurus Rex,_ to some degree, still very frightened.

“But you say the rex…she saved you?”

Owen nodded. “In a way. It was a dominance thing, a fight for supremacy. Our safety was incidental.”

Alan blinked. “Safety.” The word was, as the kids would have it, triggering. There was no _safety_ on Isla Nublar. There was no _safety_ when a fully grown female tyrannosaur was breathing her rotting breath over you and through you, no safety when velociraptors, in pack formation, were _hunting_ you!

And Alan might have screamed all of that in Owen’s face, dumped coffee his lap, and stormed out. He might have, years ago, when the chances were that Owen Grady was a proclaimed fan of Dr. Grant’s, a huge reader, or a scholar looking for a loophole in the new “theories” put out by the previously acclaimed scientist, fallen now from his mighty perch. He would have, if Owen smirked even just a little.

But Owen’s face was a mirror of Alan’s, from those long-ago days in the western states when the discovery of a plesiosaur's full and intact jaw should have excited him, but just made him weary, just saddened him. And, under a blanket of stars and with Ellie snoring beside him, kept him up, wondering what horrors had once awaited the seemingly passive plesiosaur, if in fact it had been passive, if it had been a secret tyrant of the sea.

Owen’s face was drawn, wary, and oh, so tired.

Alan knew it all, and then some.

_Our safety was incidental._

So Alan swallowed his tirade and breathed through his nose. He had other questions. “Is the Indominus – that’s the name, right? – is it dead? Are you sure?”

Owen didn’t lower his eyes when he nodded, and that gave Alan more reassurance.

“The rex injured her pretty badly. I think, if she hadn’t been attacked again by the mosasaur, she might have died from her injuries alone. The raptors…they did their share of damage, too.”

Here it was. The reverence in Owen’s voice, the one thing Alan had honestly wanted to take this man to task on. 

“The raptors,” he repeated, trying to keep disgust out of his voice.

“Blue especially,” said Owen, his gaze now hazy and far away. “By rights the Indominus should have had her for dinner. But Blue gave better than she got, in the end. She….”

“Saved you.” Alan had a hard time believing what he was hearing.

Owen simply nodded, face now blotched red from sorrow or embarrassment.

For so long, when Alan Grant laid his head down at night, closed his eyes, he saw the claws and flash of teeth that would forever characterize the velociraptor for him. He’d been there when Tim woke from nightmares that left him panting and shaky for a day afterwards, and he knew, it was raptors that shook Tim awake. Lex, too, though she hardly ever said so. Ellie had gone so far as to hide whatever velociraptor parts their research had turned up – at least, Alan had assumed it was hidden, and not trashed as it more likely was.

But here sat a man who had known and trained a small pack of velociraptors from birth. He had names for them, fond memories of their babyhoods; he was like a circus trainer who couldn’t see past the animal to the predator within. No, that wasn’t accurate, either – Owen knew, as did the circus trainer, what the dangers were, and that was part of why he’d done it.

“Why did you do it?” Alan said, startling Owen, who looked spooked, as if realizing he’d drifted into a daydream.

“Why did I…do you mean the raptors? Why?”

“Yes. Why did you agree to the job, even after I told you what I knew. After everything that happened the first time, why do it?”

“Claire asked me that, the day after. Why.” Owen drank his coffee down. “I never considered why, until she asked. It was a job. It was the job – after the Navy, there wasn’t going to be anything that could really…it was the job. And when they explained what they were doing, yeah, I wondered. I didn’t want to be part of something that would end like, well, it ended. But the day Blue hatched, there was a moment, she was in my hand and I…it was a done deal.”

There was nothing Alan could think to say, because he knew. He knew. Not about raptors, there was only fear for him, no matter how dewy Owen’s eyes got. But on the island, there had been more than fear, of course there had been. All this time later, it couldn’t be fear, couldn’t be terror that held him and Lex and Tim together. Had held him to Ellie and Ian. It was more than that, and Owen’s expression told Alan that the island had given him whatever _that_ was as well.

They sat at the café for another hour, talking about dinosaurs, but talking about everything else, too. 

-

“So how’d it go?” Lex was coming home from a run when she called; he could hear her trying to catch her breath.

“Better than I expected.”

“He was sorry for his part in it? He took some responsibility for encouraging a dangerous enterprise that ended in horror and death?”

It could be said that Lex still had some issues to work through. Not that Alan particularly blamed her.

“It was more that we came to an understanding, about the island. About the experience.”

Lex must have heard it in his voice, because when she spoke again, the sarcasm was gone, the tone softened.

“The experience was something, alright. It was scarring. But that isn’t what you mean at all, I’m guessing.”

Alan looked over at his mantle, where a small selection of framed photos stood. There was one of all of them, taken maybe a year after their own escape; Tim had grown a solid six inches in that year, Lex’s face had sharpened, Ian’s hair grayed.

“No, no it isn’t. There was good that came out of that, too, you know. And Owen Grady knows something about the good.”

They talked for awhile, about Tim, and a little about Ellie. Ian was on that evening’s broadcast of Nightly News, and it was like having him there, like in those first moments when Alan found him insufferable and not a little ridiculous, hitting on Ellie, making light or so it seemed of all they were hearing from John Hammond.

Yes, Alan thought. Owen may have found something a little different, but Alan did understand.

The news interview with Ian was interspersed with video of Owen following a redhead he couldn’t take his eyes off of. Claire Dearing.

Yes. Alan understood. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." -  
> Søren Kierkegaard


End file.
